


the heavy weight of blood and bone

by transcendencism



Series: death to bioware timeline [2]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Animal Death, Emetophobia, Gen, Gore, Planet Korriban | Moraband (Star Wars), The Dark Side of the Force (Star Wars), animal experimentation, the Sith making interesting career choices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27123673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transcendencism/pseuds/transcendencism
Summary: Renning went at the damn thing like a gleeful child, watching with beady and hungry eyes as the guts burst free from the stomach and called it beautiful. “Such is the way of the Sith,” he explained when she turned away. Such is the way of the Sith, she echoed inside her head as the blood pinged on the dusty metal floor of the lab. Everything her master did was to bring himself closer to the Dark Side, and wasn’t it time for her to follow in his footsteps?
Series: death to bioware timeline [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1979875
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	the heavy weight of blood and bone

**Author's Note:**

> cross-posted from tumblr, i originally wrote this ~one month ago.

Nerah didn’t have the stomach for observing Lord Renning’s experiments the way Malora did. Even after several years serving under him, she only saw the operating table once. The tuk’ata lay on its side on the metal table, and Renning feverishly cut a jagged line down from the base of the creature’s neck down its belly. He pulled the halves of flesh back, and the body gave a sickening squelch as blood and intestines spilled across the table and dripping off the edge.

Malora only wrinkled her nose and complained about the stench. It took all the strength Nerah had not to vomit. It wasn’t that she’d never seen someone cut open an animal before; her step-mother taught her how to skin and fillet fish when she was barely old enough to be trusted with a knife. The difference was that she was taught to respect the body: everything would be used, nothing was to be wasted, and the carving was supposed to be respectful.

Renning went at the damn thing like a gleeful child, watching with beady and hungry eyes as the guts burst free from the stomach and called it _beautiful_. “Such is the way of the Sith,” he explained when she turned away. _Such is the way of the Sith_ , she echoed inside her head as the blood pinged on the dusty metal floor of the lab. Everything her master did was to bring himself closer to the Dark Side, and wasn’t it time for her to follow in his footsteps?

So she was sent into Korriban’s wilds and its tombs to retrieve a variety of fauna for her master to dissect. He had a bizarre affection for the tuk’ata (maybe he liked the particular crunch of the bones that you didn’t quite get with k’lor’sugs), and Nerah got quite good at killing them. Unlike Renning, Nerah took no such pleasure in the task; it didn’t sicken her like the surgical table, but there were only so many times you could hunt something until the thrill wore off.

Though Renning’s claims were asinine, she felt the Dark Side reverberate in those creatures. She couldn’t suck it out of them for herself like Renning thought, but it thrummed against the periphery of her mind and she swore they saw her intentions. The thought of her prey somehow being sentient, and that they were proficient enough with the Force that they could glimpse their death moments before it was realized, left a bad taste in her mouth.

But, like all else on Korriban, she got over it. She only had two options after all: move on, or die.


End file.
